38 Studios Won’t Be Releasing Its MMORPG

38 Studios financial woes have been in the news over the last week. Despite not being able to make loan payments to Rhode Island, there were sounds coming from the administration that it would try to make it work.

That’s the worst kind of news that an investor can hear. When a company can’t make payroll, it’s not generally long for the world.

What I’m wondering is where that $75 million got to.

Schilling, as I understood it, invested something like $30 million of his own money, which coupled with that $75 million from RI provides a bankroll of over $100M. They’ve had a game release which presumably did well too. Where is all the cash?

It’s not like Project Copernicus has the scope of the $300M budget for SWTOR. Or does it?

In anycase, it’s probably not wise to get your hopes up for the 38 Studios MMORPG. Not unless an Angel Investor swoops in at the 11th hour. Or another studio buys the IP and development assets.

3 Comments

Hey, they’ve been around for six years, they had ~300 employees at peak, plus however much work they outsourced. You could eat $100 million in payroll with those numbers and not produce anything. And then they bought Azeroth Adviser… and killed it… along with Big Huge Games. I know where the money went… big dreams and bad planning.

Hi Wilhelm. I didn’t realise that 38 Studios was that big. You’re right, that will burn up the cash fairly quickly. Especially since this has been in progress for six years. (It doesn’t seem that long ago I first heard of 38 Studios.)

Still, perhaps if they had focussed on getting the game out the door, without being distracted by buying other businesses…